Tag Archives: noise-rock

Legion Of Andromeda’s debut LP, ‘Iron Scorn’, is the most singularly revolting thing I’ve heard in quite some time. For all the horror and disgust, though, it’s also strangely compelling: like watching one slug eat another slug. It’s gruelling, intense and certainly not for the faint of heart – listen to it here while you read these words, all of which were provided by vocalist -R-.

Please tell us a bit about how Legion Of Andromeda got started – how did you meet and what was your original ambition?

Our wives, former work colleagues, decided to introduce us. One day by chance they were talking about the deranged behavior of their respective husbands, discovering that we were both listened to disgusting music every day, wasting family money on records and obscure gear and generally endorsing paranoia, hatred and misanthropy. We became friends and after many deafening listening sessions, show attendances and much alcohol abuse -M- asked to do something together and I accepted.

Our original ambition? Create something different.

How would you say the band has changed, developed or moved on between the demo and the new LP?

Our sound is the aspect that has developed most. Recording with Steve Albini (a massive achievement for us) benefited the sound enormously, adding a presence and an overall impact we always wanted to have. The huge wall of sound he was able to obtain has no equal and we couldn’t have asked for more.

On the songwriting side, sharpening the approach, achieving focus, embracing refinements are the real developments. We’re totally uninterested in adding different instrumentation, sound layers, fancy arrangements and shit like that. Involution is the key, we don’t want to progress, to get more ‘arty’ or elegant just to accomplish current trends. We don’t want to ruin our noise with clean post metal arpeggios and scum like that. Primitivism is liberation.

The album is an incredibly intense and gruelling experience. Please tell us how you arrived at this sound and what you are trying to achieve.

Reaching altered states of consciousness through compulsive repetition is the maximum achievement. Self-disintegration generating a massive amount of destructive energy is the way we arrive at that.

I find the record weird, because while there doesn’t seem to be much variation it’s still gruesomely compelling. What do you think it is about this music that can hold peoples’ attention? How do you differentiate/distinguish between hypnotic repetition and boredom?

Being constantly forged in tension, LOA’s sound is torturous and the principle of torture is sadistic repetition. While horrible, torture is anything but tedious. Even if it may seem that LOA’s sound is just the same over and over, I must say that the riffs are never identical and songs follow a precise structure even with changes and subtle dynamics. Nothing is left to chance and we’ll never release a song if we’re not 100% satisfied with the results as we’re extremely exigent and everything must be perfect. It’s a minimalist approach and we find it way more fascinating and creative, even more difficult and challenging to accomplish, than, say, progressive music. Minimalism is extremely deep, as it lets you explore a single theme in all its aspects, implications and consequences. Less is always more. We’re totally conscious that boredom is the main enemy of music, so we’ll never play post progressive technical blah blah nonsense.

Do you have to be in a particular zone or headspace to make music together? Is it ever too depressing, challenging or tiring to get together and play this kind of music?

Just being ourselves.

How does Legion Of Andromeda’s music reflect you as individuals? What part of you does making music like this satisfy?

Speaking of myself I always been and still am extremely pissed off, nervous and intolerant toward people, human behavior, the superficial way mankind communicates. Even lot of people into the music scene tend to be scum, following trends and acting like idiots. I’m constantly driven by hate so LOA is the primal outburst of all this rage and anger. Same for -M-: suffice to say that if he didn’t work this much, hate his colleagues this much and continue to be stressed this much he would not be able to write music so violent. He deeply hates his working environment but doesn’t want to quit because his riffs would suffer for it.

Tell me about that cymbal crash: it almost seems like a beacon running through the record. It puts my nerves on edge, and yet the regularity is almost comforting…

It’s LOA’s pulsating core, it’s paramount, it’s quintessential. No LOA without that. Saying you find it unnerving but comforting means you already saw through and accepted LOA. You let it drill your brain.

How do you want listeners and audiences to react or respond to your music? Would you feel more rewarded if they stayed staring until their ears bled or if they ran from the room screaming?

Trend-following scumbags and narrow-minded idiots will run away and that’s totally fine with us as we don’t need the consent of such garbage. Likewise, we’ll be more than happy to mentally sodomize the people who have the guts to stay.

Who do you view as your peers and influences? I hear elements of Swans, Corrupted and Godflesh, but you definitely don’t sound ‘like’ any one band per se…

Well, thanks for saying that, as sounding like no one is a necessity for us. We got totally sick of the nth shitty doom band or the usual clones. Fuck off that weak shit. Of course, Swans, Godflesh, VON, Big Black and Suicide influenced LOA in one way or another but, again, they’re more subtle, more unconscious than real, as LOA is primary a process of deconstruction and ultimately the reflection of our own personas.

How does Legion Of Andromeda fit in with Tokyo’s music scene? While there is often a focus on the hardcore bands coming out of Japan and there are several ‘bigger’ artists that everyone knows about (Boredoms, Zeni Geva, Merzbow, Acid Mothers Temple…) it would be interesting to know what is happening beyond these spheres.

We’re still novel in the Tokyo underground so I don’t have an exact opinion. However I think LOA is a sort of transversal force so it can fit well both on noise and metal scenes.

What does the future hold for Legion Of Andromeda? Will you be touring the LP, and what can we expect next?

We have a couple of very exciting projects on the horizon but they’re still in early stages, so no need to disclose them now. Second, we’d like to tour overseas to promote ‘Iron Scorn’ – nothing confirmed yet, but we’re working on it.

Is there anything you would like to add or say that you haven’t covered already?

I recently reviewed DEAD’s brilliant ‘Idiots’ LP. Like most of bands on Eolian Empire they play horrible, heavy music but in a way that’s skewed and artful. Thinking man’s bludgeon, if you like. I was intrigued enough to ask them some questions, and they were kind enough to answer them.

Jem plays drums and Jace plays bass. Both have some thoughtful things to say.

So, tell us about DEAD. How, when and why did the band get started?

Jem: We started in late 2010. We both played together in “Fangs Of…” and wanted a band that could tour more often. We thought about who else we could do this with and then realised if we operated as a two-piece then we wouldn’t have to rely on anyone else. I think we originally intended to try having a floating third member that could just make noise over the top of our songs. But we seemed to fill the sonic space ourselves pretty quickly without that.

Touring was a priority from the start. I booked our first tour before we’d even written a song. So the band very much was formed on the stage.

Jace: Basically we knew we were very compatible bandmates. I wanted to be in a band that could be creatively fluid and basically do MORE of everything, Jem was definitely on the same page about that. We both enjoy pushing ourselves artistically and we’re always trying to get more done than is physically possible. We’ve been great mates for ages, so working and touring together is a lot of fun.

What was the original idea behind the band? Did you set out to do or sound like anything in particular?

Jace: Volume! No. I write a lot of material and it’s rarely if ever planned and at the risk of sounding like a wanker, artistic freedom is way too important to me to set boundaries for myself. I listen to a lot of different music and I’d say it all influences me to varying degrees. There are definitely bands that I’d say we relate to sound wise in certain ways but I think that’s more due to an aesthetic rather than copying a style. I definitely look up to a lot of bands and musicians, and visual artists. I’m regularly blown away by what people have created which always pushes me to work harder.

Jem: The only idea was to have fun and make music together. We didn’t set out to make a particular sound but we definitely had ideas of things we wanted to avoid – mainly things that a lot of other two pieces use like excessive effects, delays, loops etc. I know I pushed that idea a lot. I wanted to exploit the rawness of the two piece format rather than try to compensate for it with gadgets.

I think Jace probably had to consider his sound and playing a lot more than myself being that he often is playing the role of a bass and of a lead guitar at once.

The idea of aiming for a particular sound has never appealed to me and I don’t think we’d be much good at it. I’m not claiming that we have an entirely unique sound of course, our influences are not hidden. But we never set out to make a particular kind of music.

Now that we’ve doing it a few years I would say we have honed our sound to a degree. But if we’re making a particular genre of music it’s news and I’d love to know which demographic we can sell it to!

There’s only two of you. Clearly. Was this a self-imposed limitation, or was it just too difficult to find other people who wanted to make music like this?

Jem: A bit of both. We wanted to be more active musically than we had been in our previous bands and not have to compromise on that based on other peoples’ availability or lack thereof. A lot of people seem to focus on the limitations of a two-piece format but I think every format has its strengths and weaknesses. The dynamic of a two piece is unique, it’s very intimate. It probably means we both have to work harder (both playing wise and as far as running the band) but we’re not afraid of hard work.

It still surprises a lot of people; the idea of a heavy two piece band. But for us, by the time we started this band, the precedent had long been set and I’d played in two other drum/bass bands already.

Finding other members wouldn’t be difficult but I don’t have any reason to believe it would improve the band.

We have plans for some recordings as a three-piece with an artist called BJ Morriszonkle but the idea is that the he won’t be locked into any long term commitments. This project is sort of an offshoot I guess.

Jace: We definitely floated the idea of having other band members but from pretty much the first rehearsal it felt exciting just having the two of us. We also quickly realised that there was no gaping sonic hole that needed plugging so why complicate things? It took a while for me to figure out my sound and a technique that I was happy with but the challenge was too good to pass up.

There’s a ton of people we’re both interested in collaborating with but at the moment I can’t imagine including anyone else permanently.

What can you tell us about ‘Idiots’? Despite the deceptively simple set-up there’s a lot going into it…

Jace: Compositionally the album is fairly unconventional a lot of the time so despite not being overly complicated I think it’s a relatively challenging listen.

Jem: Recording-wise most of those songs are tracked live on the first take. There is very little in the way of overdubs. We took this approach because we didn’t have the money to spend long in the studio (not in a decent studio anyway) and decided we’d rather highlight the rawness of the band than try and smooth it all over. Overdubbing can fill out the sound but can also squash the instruments. We go for a pretty big sound most of the time so leaving those sounds room to breathe in a lot of cases made it sound heavier, and more confronting than if we layered the sounds.

I made mistakes all over that recording but I think it still sounds good – it’s an honest account of where we were at there and then. Making a recording that, for the most part, honours our live sound made sense too since we were and are predominantly a live band.

Of course if we had more budget to work with we would love to make a more studio based album too – many of our favourite records are like that. That’s something that we have always wanted to do and hopefully we will do one day when we have the budget to do it properly.

What kind of themes or ideas do you explore on the album?

Jem: Jace writes most of the lyrics. For the most part I don’t quiz him too much about it because I trust him and it’s a personal thing. Jace doesn’t spell things out in his lyrics anyway. That’s one thing we both like to avoid for the most part. Being around a lot of punk bands we get very tired of singers lecturing us like we’re idiots. For us the voice is more about being an extra instrument at our disposal than trying to tell the audience something specific. I generally find that kind of approach condescending to the listener.

Any lyrics I write seem to be about racism or anxiety and I guess that’s because they’re close to me. But we’ve never been concerned with pigeon holing our themes or spelling them out. That seems far too limiting to me.

Most of the music I have made in my life has been instrumental. For me I often find lyrics a distraction from the mood of the music, or at least they can limit the possibilities that music could have had. At the same time vocals can also be the most primal instrument of all so I guess we generally try and approach it with that in mind.

Jace: For the most part my lyrics are open to interpretation. It’s more important to me to create a mood rather than to directly describe something, that’s not to say they’re meaningless, I just like giving the listener space to engage in a non-linear way. Sometimes my lyrics are more like short stories that are probably easier to get a sense of but I still like them to be a bit of a riddle. Some of the singing is probably indecipherable which becomes more instrumental or textural which I also enjoy. I don’t mean to be evasive on this question, the lyrics can be found on our bandcamp page with every track so they’re there to be pulled apart if anyone has the energy.

The spoken word vocals on ‘Murder Hollow’ are great. Who is Linda Dacio and how did you get her involved?

Jace: The lyrics for this track are a short story so we wanted them to be very audible. I was Jem’s idea to get Linda involved, her voice really suited the track she did a killer job.

Jem: Linda J is a national treasure. I first saw her play when I was in High School and she sang ‘RX7’ with “Legends of Motorsport.” It’s well worth looking up the recording of that, it’s a great Australian performance in my opinion.

I originally asked Bliss Blood (Pain Teens) if she would do some vocals on that track but she declined. Which turned out to be a blessing ‘cos then we got Linda. Linda is an amazing singer. But I have always had a real thing for people who can sing well and choose not to over sing. Like Shannon from Cows or Bliss Blood – they were both great at blurring the line between singing and speaking. So I felt kind of bad when we got her in and I kept asking her to sing less and talk more. She is a great singer with a belter of a scream and a natural distortion. But she did a great job, a total professional in a very punk rock kind of way – her performance gives me goosebumps. I was really happy with it how it came out. The fact we all three sang on that song gave it a different dynamic, one that you just can’t get with only male singers.

Since the LP came out you’ve had a couple of split 7”s. How would you say your sound / songwriting has evolved?

Jace: This question is HARD! I’m constantly writing songs so I hope it’s evolving. I set challenges for myself when writing. I’ve been trying to incorporate more melody into our material whether it’s done vocally or instrumentally. I just try to write songs that will push our playing in some way so that they remain interesting and exciting to play.

Jem: The split with No Anchor was recorded before Idiots, during the demo sessions for Idiots actually. The Split with Vaz was recorded in Japan at the end of a tour there. Sound-wise I think we’ve honed it a fair bit since the beginning but I have no idea how different it sounds to the outsider. I know we started doing a bit more metal stuff. Metal in the traditional sense.

It’s funny we talk a lot about the kinds of songs we want to write but It doesn’t mean that what comes out the other end is closely related to what we discuss. It’s more of a starting point I guess. I just try and find our strengths and work on exploiting those.

How did these split releases come about? Also, have to say it – Vaz kinda seem like a perfect band for you to share a record with…

Jace: I’ll let Jem handle the first part of this question.

Jem: No Anchor are friends from long before we started DEAD. Got a lot of respect for the way those guys operate. They’ve managed to do everything on their own terms and despite making music that isn’t especially accessible they’ve developed a cult following.

Working with them seemed logical to me. I honestly can’t remember if it was their idea or ours though. I think it was theirs. Which just proves even more what good blokes they are; clearly not driven by popularity.

Vaz are just one of our favourite bands around right now. I love how every album evolves form the last. We played with them on our first US tour and they moved us a great deal. We invited them to Australia and they came over. The only bummer was the tour we did with them was really hard work. Everything that could go wrong did. It bummed me out ‘cos they are such a great band and deserved better.

Jace: We saw and played with Vaz on our first US tour. We both thought they were incredible. They were great to tour with, very experienced and professional and they didn’t whinge about the long drives. Seeing them night after night was a real treat, they’re all great musicians who have a unique take on their instruments.

Australia seems to have a funny old scene: loads of great bands who it’s relatively hard to discover, even today in this Glorious Internet Age. I guess it’s partly because overseas tours are scarce and it costs a shitting fortune to send records or t-shirts anywhere. Do you think this imposes a kind of insularity on Australian bands/musicians?

Jace: It probably does but I really don’t know what other bands think. I think that could probably be said about most countries in a way whether it’s geographically or self-imposed. Even ‘scenes’ within ‘scenes’ adopt insularity so I don’t think it’s special to Australia. I certainly don’t feel limited by living here, it’s just a different set of challenges.

Jem: It might. Probably less so than in the past as people have more and more access to overseas travel and the net. Most of the great bands down here you’ll never hear about because they won’t tour overseas and/or they won’t get support from an overseas label.

But I think yes a lot of people down here do exist in a bubble to an extent. Big fish in a little pond kind of thing. People acting like rock stars ‘cos their band is big in one or two towns. I’d like to think it also fosters a unique sound, and for some bands it does which is great. But it seems most bands are just mimicking the bands sold to us from the US and the UK.

How do you view your homeland, and how do you think you fit in with what’s going on over there musically?

Jem: I try not to waste too much time on this and I say that because I probably have wasted too much time on it. I think there is some fucking great bands down here. We lack a good touring culture here though so most of them rarely get out of their hometowns and don’t get to improve to the level they could if they could tour. The heavy music scenes are predominantly limited to the major cities here which is also a shame; it’s seems the regional centres struggle to sustain much of a scene.

I think for the most part the underground scenes here are very conservative, even if they would like to think otherwise. Even within more extreme forms of music it feels very segregated. Most of the bands I see getting celebrated are not especially original. And there is an obsession with nostalgia which is at the expense of embracing new and creative music that is happening right now.

We’ve always felt like outsiders from any of the specific scenes and that’s okay with me. I’ve always liked a broad range of music and I have no interest in subscribing to a particular sub culture. It doesn’t feel honest to me. I’ve been playing music long enough now to see how stupid people look jumping from one style to another. It’s nice to have somewhere to belong but not if it means limiting yourself.

As to where we fit in… well basically there are bands, promoters and venues all over the country we get along with. We don’t care what genre of music they make as long as they are passionate about it. And that’s how we like it. We’ve never aimed to find other bands who sound like us. We think of it as more of an extended family than scene.

Jace: I would say that to a large extent we don’t fit in, which isn’t something we seek or are bothered by. Obviously some kind of scene is helpful but we don’t really have a home that we fit neatly into. We realise we’re a relatively ‘difficult’ band sound wise so it’s just part of the territory. Also I’m old and who wants to hang out with an old dude right??!!?? I do find it funny that people who consider themselves cultural outsiders often fall over themselves to try to fit in but hey live and let live, the last thing I want to do is worry about other people.

Kinda related to the above: is there any sense that you’re continuing some sort of foul Aussie tradition, following the likes of Feedtime, Venom P. Stinger and X? In many ways it’s a peculiarly Australian sound: arty and considered, but also yobbish, aggressive and in-your-face…

I see so many bands who would fall into the “arty” category who are too fucking pretentious to play something primal and heavy. As if they are above that ‘cos they did an arts degree. And so many rock bands who snob anything that might be considered a bit intellectual or arty. I’ve never understood why the two can’t co-exist more. Through our label we just released a split 7” between The Hard Ons and The Necks. These are two bands who have complete respect and adoration for each other but a decent chunk of each other’s crowds would never give the other band the time of day.

For me my biggest drive in making music has always been to tap into the inner cave man/woman inside all of us. For some reason people confuse primal with limited or stupid though and that’s really far off the mark. I think one of the strongest primal urges is to discover new things and to learn. You can see that in babies all the time.

People always think AC/DC is simple but I challenge those people to try and play their songs half as well as them. You won’t find a tighter band. And they have no bullshit to hide behind. Or a band like Midnight Oil who made a lot of hard, driving music but there is so much going on it if you look under the surface.

So anyway yes our music is considered, we spend a lot of time thinking about it and trying to improve it. If we have a simple idea and we like it we will back it rather than try and cover it up with bells and whistles. And if the art wankers think it sounds like yobbos shouting then it’s their loss.

As far as continuing an Aussie tradition; well we are Australian. That’s just who we are, we would never try and be anything else. But we are not trying to emulate anything nostalgic. Those bands were great because they were innovative and that’s the main thing we’d want to take from them; an attitude more than a style.

Jace: I don’t feel like we’re deliberately continuing anything but I’d say we are somehow undeniably attached to that aesthetic. I’ve always really liked the tension between those kinds of elements. I’m a big fan of a lot of post-punk and experimental music but I also love AC/DC… have you ever studied their backing vocals?? Genius!!

I’ve never really thought about it being a uniquely Aussie thing but maybe it is. Having said that there are some current US bands like Rabbits and Drunk Dad who I think relate closely to this sound too.

What does the future – short and long-term – hold for DEAD?

Jace: Before we tour our new album in November we are doing a couple of support shows that we’re looking forward to, one with Torche the other with Windhand.

Other than that, we’re writing a ton of new tracks that keep us stoked.

Jem: We just released a new song on the Rock Is Hell 10th Anniversary 2×10” compilation………………

Right now we are writing our new record. We have a lot of material so I guess it’s a matter of picking what we like best. Or maybe we’ll record a double album if we can manage it. Sometime soon we will record the collaborative record with BJ Morriszonkle.

In November we will release our third album ‘Captains Of Industry’ and tour it in Australia. Early next year it will be released in Austria (Rock is Hell) and in the USA (Eolian Empire).

Mid-next year we will do our third US tour. And hopefully after that we can get to Europe!

If any band deserves to be named after a landfill site it’s Norway’s Årabrot, a demented slagheap of noise-rock that’s about as vicious as they come. Pull on yer rubber gloves, get the Toilet Duck handy and read on…
“We started out young and bored in the summer of 2001. The result was a 7” and the birth of Årabrot – basically a snotty, abrasive garage noise band with the intention of becoming the loudest Norway had ever produced.” So says frontman Kjetil Nernes, and with a string of EPs and three shattered albums in their wake you’d be hard pushed to say they hadn’t met their goal, with latest offering ‘The Brother Seed’ loaded with more boss-eyed menace, lumpen repetition and flailing grabs for the throat than you’d ever dare shake a stick at. Still, a lot has changed in the nine years since the band first attached its suckered mouth to the noise-rock underbelly, with genre titans Pissed Jeans having brought the genre back home to roost and any number of lesser acts dropping names like Rusted Shut and the Brainbombs as though their credibility depended upon it. Has Nernes, in recent times, seen more acceptance of the band’s unwelcome advances? “Not really,” is his rather blunt response, “I still see a lot of question marks and frowns in Europe, as opposed to complete understanding to where we’re coming from in the States. What I do see though is the enormous effect Sunn O))) has had in bringing drones to the average metal crowd. All of a sudden people are actually interested when we’re playing the same riff for half an hour.” With the band’s influences (think 90s AmRep violence mingled with early industrial clanks) on display like cankerous war wounds talk turns to the band’s native Norway, perhaps most famed musically for gifting us a wealth of corpsepainted talent. Given the band’s malignant aura, has the dark spectre of black metal had any impact on Årabrot’s sound and how, if at all, does the band see itself fitting into the contemporary Norwegian music scene? “Some black metal bands, like Mayhem and Burzum, have been a great influence on us,” says Nernes on the first point before addressing the latter: “fitting into the current Norwegian scene has proved pointless and impossible. It’s not really anything we’re focusing on.” Indeed, making a safe little nest for themselves appears to be the last thing on Årabrot’s agenda, with Nernes already several steps ahead where the band’s future is concerned: “I’m already working on new material. Not for the follow-up to ‘The Brother Seed’, but the one after that. It’s gonna be heavier, with slower, longer songs. I’ve worked on this project for almost 10 years and I have a pretty clear vision on its progress – hopefully by the end we’ll be able to stand out as a great, genuine sounding alternative rock n’ roll band.”